An Inevitable Implication

My family and I spent the first day of the new year visiting Dennis’s parents in New Hampshire. I guess it’s nice to get away from home once in a while, but no more than that. I’ve become too much a creature of habit. Well, what others might describe as too much, but what I’d call almost perfect.

One benefit of yesterday’s change of pace was a focus on something other than the momentousness of the first day of a new year. I wasn’t concerned with anything approximating resolutions, and I think I’ll try to keep things that way in the coming days and weeks. There is a certain glorious liberation in just putting one foot in front of the other and confidently meeting whatever comes your way. While I would certainly never advocate striving for an existence devoid of meaning, I believe that many of us try too hard to create one.

Luigi Giussani spends a book proving that meaning is inherent in our very existence. Jordan Peterson rightly points out that “objectivity” is impossible, that there is no such thing as a science that deals only with concrete reality. Like the soul in a living body, meaning is impossible to extricate from anything we do. Even the very act of choosing to scientifically study something—fruit flies, perhaps—is fraught with meaning, for the scientist has, in fact, settled on fruit flies, as opposed to flying foxes or e. coli bacteria or an isotope of iodine. Even if the choice amounts to little more than, “My boss told me to study fruit flies,” it is meaningful. For instance, it tells me that this scientist (let us call him a lab technician) cares about pleasing his boss for some reason. It may be that the tech needs the job to pay his rent; it may be that he is hoping to move up to bigger and better things; it may even be that his uncle got him the job and disappointing his mother by disappointing her brother would be an ungrateful thing to do. A reason for studying fruit flies (one of those or something completely different) exists, and it cannot be dismissed, for it will affect, at some level, what that lab tech learns about fruit flies and what he transmits about them to others.

For the very fact that he lives five minutes he affirms the existence of a “something” which deep down makes living those five minutes worthwhile. This is the structural  mechanism, an inevitable implication of our reason. An eye, upon opening discovers forms and colours; so reason, by simply functioning, affirms an “ultimate,” an ultimate reality in which everything subsists, an ultimate destiny and meaning.

—Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense

Putting one foot in front of the other is important, but not necessarily because a foot is designed to move. There’s more to it than that.